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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

In an exclusive video, The Vancouver Sun's Kim Bolan tours the basement of the home on 97A in Surrey, B.C. where alleged bomb plotters John Stewart Nuttall and Amanda Marie Korody lived.

A Surrey couple charged with plotting a terrorist attack against the B.C. legislature lived on welfare, visited a local mosque and listened to radical Islamist tapes in their basement suite, their landlady said Tuesday.

Shanti Thaman said she was stunned to learn that John Stewart Nuttall, 38, and Amanda Korody, 29, had been charged in a foiled bomb plot targeting Victoria revellers on Canada Day that police say was inspired by al-Qaida ideology.

“It is shocking. We never suspected this,” Thaman said as police searched the house Tuesday afternoon. “Someone is using them.”

She said Nuttall and Korody were recovering addicts who got regular methadone deliveries from the pharmacy.

“If you saw them, they looked like they are not 100-per-cent OK,” Thaman said. “Someone must be brainwashing them.”

She said Nuttall, who had lived in the house in the 9700-block of 120th Street for about three years, always paid the rent on time.

When he first moved in, he was not a practising Muslim, but converted to Islam about two years ago and began attending a nearby mosque with Korody, who would wear a burka, Thaman said.

Both were arrested in Abbotsford Monday and are charged with knowingly facilitating a terrorist activity, possession of an explosive substance and conspiring to commit an indictable offence.

They have been remanded in custody until July 9, when they are scheduled to make a second appearance in Surrey provincial court.

At a dramatic news conference Tuesday, the RCMP showed photos of pressure cooker bombs that Nuttall and Korody allegedly assembled for detonation outside the B.C. legislature.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia said police learned of the terrorist plot from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in February, began a four-month investigation and foiled the attack.

“We detected this threat early and disrupted it,” he said. He said although police believe the threat was real, “at no time was the security of the public at risk.”

Thaman granted The Vancouver Sun exclusive access to the basement apartment after police had finished their search Tuesday evening. Clothes, boxes and garbage was strewn all over the floor. The basement suite reeked of cat urine.

The counters were covered with dishes, food scraps, a can of green beans and some soup, as well as two prescription methadone bottles in Korody’s name. There were religious plaques on a living room ledge, the coffee table and above the bed in the main bedroom. The television in the bedroom appeared to have been shot with a paintball gun, bullet holes riddling the screen.

Reflecting on the situation Tuesday, Thaman said there were several recent incidents that now seem suspicious.

Nuttall was firing off a pellet gun on their property until her husband stopped him and explained it was inappropriate.

And, about three weeks ago, the RCMP evacuated several houses on the block, saying a truck filled with hazardous chemicals had been left nearby, posing a safety risk. At the time, officers asked her about the couple in the basement suite and she led them downstairs to knock on the door.

Neither Nuttall nor Korody were home, Thaman said.

Nuttall told her last week that he wouldn’t be able to pay the entire rent until this week because he needed money for something. She even loaned him $20, which he later repaid.

And the couple had begun leaving their suite for two or three days at a time, always returning with someone driving a black pickup truck, Thaman said.

She said Nuttall was very polite and somewhat timid. He was raised by his grandmother in Victoria. The elderly woman also moved in with the couple for about two months, but has since relocated, Thaman said.

She said she believed both Nuttall and Korody had parents in Toronto and that Christmas presents had arrived from Korody’s family in December.

Thaman painted a portrait of a very simple couple who had very little furniture in their apartment and used their social assistance money to pay the rent and occasionally go to the corner store for smokes or out for coffee. She said she sometimes gave them food.

“He didn’t even have a bed to sleep on. Amanda and him slept on the floor,” she said. “I don’t know why they would be plotting something. Someone was brainwashing them.”

She said both she and her husband heard the radical tapes and videos being played downstairs more than a year ago.

Neighbour Charlene Thompson, whose back patio looks out across 97A Avenue onto the couple’s basement suite, said she phoned 911 about four months ago around 2 a.m. when she saw Nuttall screaming into a cellphone outside his suite. She told police that Nuttall was screaming about jihad and a “whole bunch of jargon that put up red flags for me.”

Police came and told her that they entered the suite and the couple was watching TV with a woman Nuttall said was his grandma.

Thompson said since that incident she stayed clear of Nuttall.

RCMP Asst. Commissioner Wayne Rideout said that both Nuttall and Korody were “self-radicalized” and that police believe they acted alone but were inspired by al-Qaida.

He said they “intended to create maximum impact and harm to Canadian citizens at the B.C. legislature on a national holiday.”

“They took steps to educate themselves and produced explosive devices designed to cause injury and death,” he said, without providing details on how Nuttall and Korody did their research.

Rideout said the RCMP used a variety of techniques to “monitor and control” the accused throughout their conspiracy, though he said he couldn’t provide specifics now that the case is before the courts.

“The suspects were committed to acts of violence and discussed a wide variety of targets and techniques,” he said. “In order to ensure public safety, we employed a variety of complex investigative and covert techniques to control any opportunity the suspects had to commit harm.”

Despite the similarities between the B.C. pressure cooker bombs and those used in the Boston Marathon bombings in April, the RCMP said there was no connection between the two cases.

Nuttall has a criminal record that includes a 2010 conviction for possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose. He also has convictions for robbery, mischief, kidnapping and breaching probation conditions.

Articles about his run-ins with the law link his troubles to drug addiction and his susceptibility to be manipulated by others. High on cocaine in May 2002, he struck a Victoria businessman on the head with a rock and stole his briefcase. In the mid-’90s, he got 18 months in jail for vicious assaults carried out to collect drug debts.

More recently, he set up a Reverbnation account to promote his heavy metal songs.

One, titled In League With Satan, says: “We are possessed by all that is evil, The death of your god we demand, We spit at the virgin you worship and sit at Lord Satan’s Left Hand.”

People, like Nuttall, who are on the fringes of society are more prone to radicalization, experts told The Vancouver Sun Tuesday.

Simon Fraser University security expert Joshua Labove said radicalization “seems to be a way in which people separate themselves from mainstream Canadian society.”

“These individuals over a period of time stepped out of what we see as the traditional connections and communities that form Canadian public life,” Labove said. “We don’t know why these Canadians became radicalized or to what end. ... We know they were radical enough to want to inflict harm on a large number of people on a day that is of great national significance and celebration.”

Satyamoorthy Kabilan, director of national security and strategic foresight for the Conference Board of Canada, said a precursor to self-radicalization is “perceived persecution and perceived isolation.”

But only a very small number of those who self-radicalize go on to embrace violence, said Kabilan, who recently completed a study on domestic radicalization.

“There is no single model that can distinguish between those who are radicalized, and those who are radicalized to violence and that’s where the real problem is,” Kabilan said.

“One of the most significant terrorist threats today comes from homegrown violent extremists because the big problem is in identifying them and then in preventing them from acting out.”

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